Digging the Vein (3 page)

“
The heroin I bought last night was so-so at best, but I dumped a lot into my wake up shot and managed to find a decent vein in my ankle. The dope flooded my bloodstream and I could feel normality returning: my aching muscles relaxed, the ice unthawed around my bones, my jangling nerves subsisted. I looked at my watch; it was 6:30 a. m. Another perfect fucking day had begun.”
(p. 90)*

The need of escape painted in a black veil of irony, some situations which exacerbate our ridiculous behaviors… In this book, irony is sometimes waiting with the narrator an absent dealer in a dark street corner and sometimes locked in a fast food joint’s toilets. Drug addicts’ everyday life considered as a crystallization of the human behavior the volatile wandering of conscience… the unceasing reproducibility of those self-consuming instants… A
Connaissance par les gouffres
(
knowledge through the abyss ?
) that the author tries to pace up and down. In his never-ending dope quest, in the palpable void of his sad routine, through the frictions between the lack and the excesses, the street junky represents the entire humanity. We are all lunatics seems to say O’Neill. Some do drugs, some others pray or work… so what?

“”
Where is it going to end ?” I asked him.

“
Death” he told me “for all of us. For the whole city. The world man. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you smell it? It’s the last days of Rome, the empire is crumbling and we’re doing all that there is left to do.”
(p. 46)*

In between the bitter brutality of Bukowski and Lester Bangs’ fury, between Huncke and Selby Jr, William Burroughs and his son, but with something more modern and rock n roll, O’Neill’s writing displays itself around influences from which he takes a distance. A more contemporary vision on the occidental wandering, on the affliction of our society and the absolute need of escaping it.

A new way of writing maybe… A text built like a rock n roll song. Sentences are twisted like a Sonic Youth composition, the world seems as desperate as listening
Decades
but with a kind of Lou Reed’s biting irony. An amplified prose hitting us silently! Starting to shake, becoming crazy… like if a Bukowski’s short story became a song of Joy Division in William Burroughs’ corpse.

The shadow of Ian Curtis floats in this corrosive writing, which also reflects to Artaud, through the body analysis who became an uneasy obstacle and through the vindictive social and institutional critics.

« Les toxicomanes malades ont sur la société un droit imprescriptible qui est celui qu’on leur foute la paix. »
Artaud

(
The sick drug addicts have an imprescriptible right on society, which is to leave them in peace
)

Dedicating his book to outcasts, junkies, prostitutes, dealers, burnouts and any kind of psychos, Tony O’Neil shows the necessity of being different from a crawling norm or an omnipotent government. A scream into the modern world’s darkness, a punch in the face of a society who tries to destroy any parcel of humanity in bodies wherefrom utility has to be maximized. If affliction is too big, it’s much better to fuck yourself up, to surf on momentary pleasures. Like Artaud said in his letter to the decider of the narcotic law;

« Tout homme est juge, et juge exclusif, de la quantité de douleur physique, ou encore de vacuité mentale qu’il peut honnêtement supporter. »

(
Any man is judge and exclusive judge of the amount of physical pain and mental vacuity he can honestly handle.
)

« From the day we are born we are forced to submit to completely false and ridiculous institutions such as school, the state, god, police, government, work, the idea of being a good citizen (…), marriage, wholesomeness and a moral code. All of this imposed on us down the years by the kind of conservative, church loving assholes who have made this world the farce it is for as long as we have had a concept of society. I choose to deal with it by shooting dope. It’s either that, or commit a mass murder.”
(p. 180)*

Narcotics, wandering and the Brian Jonestown Massacre here renamed
The Electric Kool Aid
!!! Ephemeral companion of Anton Newcombe’s tortuous road, sharing opiate disillusion, sonic experimentation and refusal to conform with one of the last
Rock n Roll Animal
. The author restores the gloomy and mythic atmosphere floating over The Brian Jonestown Massacre: a psychotic leader, musicians leaving the band one after another, muso types getting insulted, another ruined concert or the chaos existing during rehearsals.
Quick a fix while no one is watching*!
A musical parenthesis for a man lost in addiction’s limbo, like if his body had a strange reaction after a speedball… The Brian Jonestown’s episode is for Tony O’Neil the ultimate stage before the fall. Imprisoned in his vice and not able to stick to his world, no money and nowhere to stay just this fucking necessity to satisfy.

« I was out of luck, out of dignity, out of money, and out of veins. »
(p. 205)*

Sex or dope, rock n roll or writing… O’Neil tries to find a way out, a universe where he can live and handle as he says in the introduction of
Notre-Dame du vide
. To Escape and to forget and even to forget that we escape! It doesn’t matter as long as we’re somewhere else, as long as we’re different. Like the road he used to explore since he was young with Marc Almond for example, existence considered as a repetitive movement. Going slowly from one place to the other to do here what we endured over there…

A life he’d be able to cross quickly in a progress of self-combustion. A life scattered over anchoring points with foul stenches. Those disgusting toilets where he’s forced to fix himself all along his life sickness... An enclosure of nauseous freedom! Toilets are in
Digging the Vein
a possible space where it’s possible to pull out of reality. A place of nowhere, another kind of utopia. Filling the veins with poison where the body usually gets rid of its rejection. The veins precisely; so difficult to localize in the angular failings of an extenuating organism! Veins wherefrom blood splashes are spreading on the walls of different toilets for the joy of the narrator.

« I felt like a dog marking its territory. I had gone in the nicer hotel in West Hollywood to use the bathrooms and leave my mark on their pristine walls. It gave me a curious satisfaction (…). Perfect. I was the junky Jackson Pollock. »
(p.91)*

As
the veins are digging
and rotting, as the fact of shooting himself in the neck emphasizes affliction, O’Neil brings his sense of humor where we can’t really expect. For a junky toilets are an area where it’s possible to give life a break, it’s the needle’s territory! In O’Neil’s writing, humor is like a breath inside the agony of the story. But outside of the cabinets, beyond irony, there is the urban hell and the body’s pain. There are the infinitely tangled streets and those veins;
digging; always digging
! Fortunately you can find toilets where it’s possible to get wasted for the price of a cheeseburger…

Heroin becomes so important for the narrator and the reader that we almost forget sex and rock n roll, those instants of illusionary freedom the book started with… A young guy gets to L.A. during a US tour with his successful band, he has a little money and a lot of hope, he falls in love and decides to stay away the usual grey atmosphere of London where he lives. He’ll have some success, he knows it! Despite the strength of his beliefs, hope is fading out and his relationship consumes itself. No more band, no album to record, no concerts; he writes, drinks and takes more and more speed. Then he breaks up with Christiane and starts heroin. His desires go away as addiction increases… The possibilities he used to envisage not long ago, the oscillating eventuality of his fantasy… what can he do now? Take more drugs to give everyday’s persistence another form.

« I was as uncreative as I was unsexual. Still I had my friends and I had my drugs”
(p. 12)*

A long way out of this anguished path, reproducing Hollywood’s disillusion in London before meeting Vanessa, a Dionysus omen, a Satori! Exploring again the joy of fluid and life, of innocence and oblivion, fucking with a new sensual delight! Thanks to this meeting and the sensitive surge going through his body, love will slowly make his gloomy routine an old souvenir… Eventually he’ll be able to sing and to enjoy…